Recover from the Snapshot (/home only)

Spectrum Scale provides an online backup that allows easy recovery from common problems such as accidental deletion of a file or the need to compare older versions of the same file.

Snapshots of the Spectrum Scale file systems (/home) are taken every day, and retained for the last seven days. Older snapshots are deleted automatically. Snapshots of a file system are read-only; changes can only be made to the active non-snapshot files and directories.

Snapshot directories are not visible to the ls command or readdir() function.

For example, the command

ls -a /home/<user>

does not list the hidden read-only folder .snapshots, but both

ls /home/<user>/.snapshots and

cd /home/<user>/.snapshots

do.

Recovering a file or a directory from Spectrum Scale snapshots is straightforward. For instance, type

cd /home/<user>/.snapshots

and choose the most convenient snapshot among the available dates, then copy the old file to the original directory.